His center found once more, Dulmur climbed onto the transporter platform next to Lucsly. The older, gray-haired agent threw Dulmur a stern glance. “Looks like you finally get your wish,” Lucsly said without humor. “You’ll get to meet James Kirk.”
Dulmur rolled his eyes. “It was one little comment to Captain Sisko, nearly ten years ago. Are you ever going to let me live that down?”
“Probably not.”
XIV
Timeship Two
Confluence 2275/2383
Kirk, Scott, McCoy, and Chekov materialized on the timeship’s bridge, accompanied by an Edosian medtech and a helmeted security guard. It was located where auxiliary control would have been in an old-style Constitution-class ship, but outfitted with modern consoles, like a scaled-down version of their own bridge. Their immediate reaction, though, was to the bluejumpsuited personnel who lay motionless around the bridge. “Bones,” Kirk said, and the doctor and his medtech hurried to tend to the crew.
“Sir,” Scott said, “most of this is civilian equipment, but it’s as good as Starfleet issue.” Indeed, the differences in design were subtle, so Scott could easily work the engineering console. “Aye, they’ve wired something alien in here. Probably a Vedala drive. It’s in a bay just forward of main engineering.”
“Go, Scotty. I’ll meet you there when we’ve seen to the crew. Chekov, go with him.” Scott and Chekov acknowledged the order and left, while the other guard remained, assisting with the timeship crew.
“Jim,” McCoy said. “Most of them are comatose or dissociated. But this one, the captain . . . she’s in a cataleptic state. Her breathing’s slowed.” The woman frozen in the command chair was statuesque and dark-haired, her large eyes staring blankly. McCoy took something from his medkit and injected her.
“I know this woman,” Kirk said after studying her for a moment. “Tracey Amritraj. She was a captain in Starfleet Intelligence. She’s supposed to have retired.”
“This is a civilian ship, sir,” Chekov pointed out.
“At least it’s supposed to be. But Delgado probably called in a lot of old favors to get this done. Bones, can you bring the captain around?”
“I can try. But the best thing for all these people is to beam them back to the Enterprise, get them out of this interphase field.”
“All right,” Kirk said. “But command officers, department heads, anyone healthy enough to be revived and knowledgeable enough to help us find out what’s going on here, should be treated here.”
McCoy glowered. “I’ll do what I can. But we need to start beaming the rest back right away.”
“Go to it, Bones.”
“Thank God,” Teresa Garcia’s voice came over Dulmur’s suit speaker. He and Lucsly stood at the command junction in the service corridor right beneath the timeship bridge, monitoring the activities of the Enterprise away team there. (No, he recalled, the twenty-third-century term would be a boarding party.) “They’re getting help.”
“With no intervention from us,” Lucsly reminded her. Had Dulmur said it, Garcia would’ve talked back, but Lucsly tended to intimidate junior agents (and sometimes senior agents), so only her silence indicated that his point was taken.
Dulmur leaned forward and peered at the bridge security display on the junction screen, watching the guard who was putting spare wrist communicators on the bridge crew—minus the captain, on whom McCoy was working—so the Enterprise transporter could lock onto them. “That’s Joaquin Perez,” he realized. “Shouldn’t he be on the Bozeman?” That ship had been attached to the DTI’s service for years following its ninety-year displacement into the future, and many of its crew still worked with the DTI on its successor, the Everett. Though Dulmur couldn’t remember if Perez was one of those—in which case he would be in transporter range of his younger self at this very moment.
“He transfers there the following subjective year,” Lucsly said.
“Mm.”
On the screen, Kirk was trying to get answers from Captain Amritraj, but the woman was only muttering, “Distress . . . need assistance . . . please respond . . . distress.”
“I guess we know who it was who sent that distress signal,” Kirk said, mirroring Dulmur’s own thoughts. “She must have been alert enough to activate it, Bones. Can’t you do more for her now?”
“Not here, Jim, I’m sorry. She needs to go back to the Enterprise.”
“Do it,” Kirk ordered after a moment. Dulmur studied his features, his voice. Kirk wanted answers badly, but he wasn’t willing to put this crew in jeopardy to get them.
“Captain,” Engineer Scott’s accented voice came over the intercom. “I’m in the engine bay. You need to come see this, sir. And bring the doctor.”
Kirk only needed a second to reflect. “I’ll be right there, Scotty.”
“We should follow him,” Lucsly said. “Wherever Kirk goes, we need to be there.”
Once he secured the junction and followed his partner aft down the service tunnel, Dulmur asked, “To do what? Kirk or no Kirk, you know the regs. Technically nothing here is an anachronistic influence except us.”
“I know.”
“So logically, anything Kirk does here is what he did anyway in our own past.”
“Unless it’s a predestination paradox. Unless our intervention is what prevents Kirk from undoing our timeline.”
“Whoa there, partner. You know there’s a reason we hate those.”
Lucsly threw a look over his shoulder. “It’s Kirk. We need to be ready for anything.”
Dulmur hurried to keep pace with his older but longer-limbed partner, wondering if the more volatile element here was Kirk or Lucsly himself.
Kirk unthinkingly followed the route that would have led from auxiliary control to main engineering on the old Enterprise. But in place of the corridor outside the main engine room, he and McCoy found themselves on a catwalk a level above the floor of a large bay. The bay was mostly filled by a bizarre spherical construction that Kirk recognized as a Vedala confluence drive. While McCoy directed Medical Technician Rixil to see to the unconscious personnel on the deck below, Kirk circled the Vedala device, trying to get a handle on it. Once he reached the aft wall, he saw it was hooked into the warp reactor by the same heavy power transfer conduits that would normally have led forward to the deflector dish.
“Aye, it’s impressive,” Scott’s voice came from a doorway at center aft of the catwalk level. “But that’s not what you need to see, sir.” He raised his voice. “Doctor McCoy, I need you in here too!”
“Soon as I can!” the doctor called.
Kirk followed Scott through the doorway and found himself in the foyer of a far more familiar space. The consoles and readouts might have been upgraded, the configuration modified as it had been so many times before, but Kirk felt it immediately: this was the old Enterprise engine room. The control center of the engine complex that had been carved whole out of the old ship’s body and had this new one built around it.
Scott’s eyes met Kirk’s in brief acknowledgment of their shared sense of homecoming, but his attention was mainly on the radiation-suited man who slumped against the master console in the foyer. “It’s Frank Gabler, sir!”
“McCoy!” Kirk called, moving over to Gabler and trying to gauge his condition. He seemed oddly peaceful, as though merely asleep, but he wouldn’t wake up. Kirk noted that Chekov was tending to the other two engineers in the main chamber beyond, slipping wrist communicators on them for beam-out.
“Good Lord.” It was McCoy, frozen in the entryway and staring at the engine room as though he’d seen a ghost. But a moment later he shook it off and went to his patient.
“Can you wake him up, Bones?” Kirk asked after a minute.
“Maybe. The effect of the interphase varies from person to person. If we’re lucky, a simple paratheragen shot should work in his case.”
The doctor injected the nerve-toxin derivative into the dark-skinned engineer’s neck. A few moments later, Ga
bler began to stir, opening his eyes. They took a moment to focus. “Captain . . . Kirk?” He convulsed a moment later, as though suddenly alarmed.
“Easy, lad,” Scott said. “It’s me, Scotty.”
“Scotty! It’s . . . I’m . . . When’d you grow a mustache?”
Kirk grabbed the young engineer by the shoulders. “Mister Gabler!” he barked in his best command tone. “Report!”
Gabler came to a semblance of attention, though his eyes still drifted. “We . . . test flight. We made a test flight. Slingshot trajectory . . . activate confluence drive.”
“For heaven’s sake, man,” Scott demanded, “what possessed you to try doin’ both those things at once? There’s no tellin’ what could happen.”
“Necessary . . . no risk . . .” Gabler shook his head, struggling to focus. He stared at the master situation display as if drawing strength from it. “Sir. The idea was that . . . we’d cross timelines during the slingshot passage. So we wouldn’t . . . risk interacting with our own future. Safer that way.”
“Safer for the timeline, maybe, but for the ship?” Scott asked.
“Calculated risk . . . sir. But as you can see . . .” Gabler sighed. “The drive got . . . stuck. Stuck in the middle. ‘It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead.’ And . . . we can’t shut it down.”
Gabler sagged, winded from the exertion of speech. “We should get you to the Enterprise,” McCoy said.
“No,” Gabler insisted. “My engines . . .” He laughed. “Sorry, Scotty. Our engines. I’m not leaving ’em. You need me.”
Scott clasped his hand. “Aye, lad. That I do.” His gaze shifted to McCoy. “Doctor, anything you can do to get him on his feet . . .”
“I’ll do what I can, Scotty. But you need to give him a few minutes.”
“All right. But if we could have the console . . .”
Kirk helped McCoy move Gabler’s seat out of the way, and Scott gave the console a quick going-over. “Look here, Captain. This is the master regulator for both the warp engines and the confluence drive.” He called up a schematic on the circular screen, studying it sadly. “Och, look what they’ve done to my poor bairns. Like tryin’ to graft an elephant’s head onto a racehorse. They’ve turned the Enterprise’s heart into somethin’ it was never meant to be.”
Kirk clapped his shoulder. “Scotty, if anyone can restore the lady’s honor, it’s you. Let’s get to work.”
On the catwalk above the starboard consoles, the cloaked Lucsly and Dulmur watched as Kirk, Scott, and the recovering Gabler attempted to diagnose the problem. “You think they can figure it out?” Dulmur asked his partner.
Lucsly was studying his temporal tricorder. “The subspace metric is a mess. The best I can figure is that since the confluence was engaged in the middle of a slingshot jump, the effect is somehow ‘trapped’ inside the inverted spacetime between Cauchy horizons.”
Dulmur nodded. He wasn’t great with the math, but he’d had the basic principles drilled into him enough back in T’Viss’s training courses. The gravitomagnetic field of a rotating black hole, or the milder one of a rotating star amplified by a chroniton field from a warp-driven ship, tilted the space and time axes in the vicinity so that moving through space locally would send you through time relative to the rest of the universe. The inverted spacetime was a sort of bridge connecting past and future, and the Cauchy horizons were the boundaries between that bridge and the normal space beyond, roughly analogous to the mouths of a wormhole. “So instead of passing through from past to present, the timeship is caught in between—and the Vedala drive is merging the two horizons, making them interchangeable.”
“Something like that. Plus the interphase effect on top of it. I’m reading quantum signatures of a parallel timeline.” Lucsly threw his partner a concerned look. “I’m not sure twenty-third-century physics is up to solving this metric.”
“Couldn’t they just shut off the power? Cut the cables to the Vedala drive?”
“No,” Lucsly said. “That would be very bad.”
“How so?”
Before his partner could answer, a voice came over their comms. “Ranjea to Lucsly and Dulmur,” the Deltan agent said, sounding excited. “There’s something you’ve got to hear.”
“What is it?” Lucsly asked.
“We’re intercepting a signal from the Enterprise in 2275. They’re within the fringes of the confluence zone so we can receive it.”
“Is this important?”
“Gariff . . . Spock is talking to Director Grey herself.”
Lucsly straightened, as though coming to attention. “Patch it through,” he said, his usual deadpan giving way to a hushed, almost reverential tone. “Patch it through now.”
U.S.S. Enterprise
Confluence 2275/2383
On the bridge viewscreen, Meijan Grey listened with quiet concern as Spock filled her in on the events taking place at the neutron star. The Enterprise’s powerful subspace transceiver, one of the many upgrades of this new design, allowed them clear real-time communication with Earth even from this remote sector. “Thank you for bringing this situation to my attention, Commander,” Grey finally said when Spock was done. “I’m gratified to hear that the crew is alive and under your doctors’ care. And rest assured you’ll have the full cooperation of the DTI’s best scientists should you need it.
“As for you, Admiral Delgado,” she went on, speaking to the man whose visage filled the other half of the split viewscreen, “I expect you to cooperate fully with the Enterprise in resolving this situation. Hold nothing back, do you understand?”
Delgado lowered his bald head gravely. “I understand, Director. I knew there would be consequences for this if it went wrong. I’m willing to accept them.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Grey said. “But recriminations can wait. For now, we need to focus on resolving this disaster. Commander Spock, do your sensors show any evidence of starships or transmissions on the other side of the confluence? Either from the future or from a parallel timeline? Or both?”
“Negative, Director. However, Captain Kirk ordered the sensors set to short-range only, as a safeguard against anachronistic information coming into our possession and potentially affecting the future course of events.”
Grey’s angular brows drew together. “I’m not sure how wise that is, Commander. If something is approaching from the other side, we need to be alerted. Any knowledge we might gain as a side effect could be contained, classified.”
Spock raised a brow. “Our knowledge of Vedala confluence technology was supposed to have been classified or erased, Director. Yet here before us is a Federation vessel employing a Vedala propulsion device.”
“Yes, and there will be an investigation into how that came about.”
“Director, the vessel bears DTI markings.”
Delgado interposed. “Call it wishful thinking, Mister Spock. Or protective camouflage. It was Arthur Manners’s idea. He wanted the markings there so that if future incarnations of the DTI detected the timeship’s arrival in their eras, they would know it was civilian and friendly in origin. As for myself, I hoped that if these experiments panned out, the Council might relax its restrictions and Timeship Two could be recognized as a legitimate temporal research vessel. Perhaps I was getting ahead of myself, Director, but it’s something of an occupational hazard.”
“Admiral, I hardly think this is an occasion for frivolity.”
“No, Director. I apologize.”
“Nor is it an occasion for incomplete truths, Director,” Spock told her. “The Department of Temporal Investigations was responsible for the dismantling of the first timeship prototype. Yet the dismantling did not occur and the records were forged. The DTI was also responsible for securing the Vedala planetoid and ensuring the return of all Vedala technology to its owners. Yet a confluence drive was removed and, again, records were forged or altered to conceal the fact. In fact, Director Grey, this timeship could not exist without the com
plicity of your department.”
“I’m very aware of that, Mister Spock. The investigation will not exclude our own people.”
“Spock,” Delgado said, “this was my doing. I subverted Manners into redirecting the matériel and concealing the evidence. But do we really have time for recriminations when there’s an emergency to resolve?”
Spock stepped forward around the helm console, folding his hands behind him. “Before we can resolve it, Admiral, Director, we must have total candor about the origins of the drive and the circumstances of its integration into the timeship. Director Grey, I understand your desire to protect the reputation of your agency. And Admiral, I am surprised, yet impressed, by your willingness to, as they say, ‘take the fall’ for another.”
“Spock, let it go,” Delgado urged.
“Under the circumstances, sir, I cannot. Director Grey, forgive me. But you are well-known for your meticulous attention to detail and your ability to discern patterns from fragmentary evidence. They are among your leading qualifications for your post. And with all due respect, the number of individuals actually employed by your department is rather small, as is the number of distinct matters for which you have responsibility. It is inconceivable that an undertaking as significant as this could have completely evaded your notice, Director—and unlikely that it could have remained secret without your direct complicity.”
Timeship Two
“What is he saying?” Lucsly said. “He can’t be saying what I think he’s saying.”
“Partner, listen,” Dulmur urged.
“He’s—he’s covering for Kirk. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Lucsly! Be quiet and listen!”
The older agent blinked. “She’s not saying anything.”
“That’s right. Why isn’t she?”
When Grey’s voice came over the channel again, it was subdued, heavy. “You have to understand, Mister Spock. We were careful. We did everything we could to ensure the timeline would be in no danger.”
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 24